Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize…
Could Jesus have sinned? Before answering the question, it's best to run through a couple of qualifiers. First, scripture clearly teaches He did not sin. Second, I realize the seeming futility when discussing hypothetical situations. The question of the peccability of Jesus, or Jesus's capacity to sin, is in reality,…
The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group. One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader…
The act of naming carries a lot of weight in the Bible. Naming denotes authority and possession; the namer signifying that he understands the thing named, and therefore possesses the requisite wisdom to rule over it. God set the stage for naming when he named the domains during the first…
This short essay makes an obvious point: Church growth is a matter of the rate of entry into a church relative to the rate of exit from that church. Perhaps church growth literature has long recognized that fact. Yet given the greater focus in church – at least in my…
If you’ve not yet heard of Aaron Renn’s three worlds framework , here’s the quick version: once upon a time, being a Christian was a net social good in American society. Whatever was going on behind the scenes in elite institutions, the general rank-and-file perception of Christianity was positive. That…
Showing page 44 of 309
Showing page 35 of 43
Ruth 1:22: So Naomi returned and with her Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, who returned from the land of Moab. And they came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest. Ruth begins tragically. Elimelech flees from famine in Bethlehem by taking his wife and sons to Moab, where…
Ruth 1:21: Naomi said, I went out full, but Yahweh has brought me back empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since Yahweh has witnessed against me and the Almighty has afflicted me? Ruth’s statement of faith is one of the most memorable and moving in Scripture. It is a…
Modern politics, we often think, is secular politics. Alexis de Tocqueville knew better. He observed that the French Revolution “took on the appearance of a religious revolution.” It was, he admitted, “a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion . . . without God, without ritual, and without life after…
In a lecture on incarnation and kenosis, Princeton’s Bruce McCormack asks John of Damascus how he can say that every act of the God-Man is “100% human and 100% divine.” Won’t the omnipotent divine act overwhelm the human act? That’s an odd question, I think. For, given divine concurrence, the…
Wise cautions from de Lubac on any effort to ease the tensions that have historically existed between church and civil order: “We can without difficulty concede the point that whichever side the absorption were effected from, everything would become infinitely simpler and much more practicable - in theory, at any…
De Lubac quotes Thomas a Kempis to the effect that “when the consummation comes, the sacraments will be employed no more,” and explains: “Human mediation, now indispensable and of primary importance, will have no raison d’etre in the Heavenly Jerusalem; there, everyone will hear God’s voice directly and everyone will…
Showing page 1454 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
